How Kate King Jewellery Replaced Stocky and Records Stock Sent to Reps

The Issue

Kate King Jewellery is a vibrational gemstone jewellery brand in Calgary, Alberta. It sells gemstone pendants, earrings and chains alongside crystals and room pieces, and Kate King works with clients through one-on-one Vibrational Analyses, workshops and speaking engagements.

The brand sells from its Calgary store and online through Shopify, from one shared pool of stock, and reaches more customers through independent consultants and retail locations worldwide. Most pieces are held one or two at a time, and groups of them regularly go out to independent retail reps to sell.

Suppliers and purchase orders ran in Stocky. When Shopify announced it was retiring Stocky, the team needed a replacement, but they weren't ready to switch overnight.

What Wasn't Working

The obvious replacements didn't fit. Most of the apps recommended to them were very expensive and did more than the team needed. They wanted something close to how they already worked in Stocky, not a bigger system to learn.

Leaving Stocky in one go was also a risk. Their suppliers, past purchase orders and the record of which supplier provides which product all lived there, and the team had to keep working while they tried something new. Before anything else, they wanted to try a replacement without it changing their stock or pushing Stocky aside.

The replacement also had to handle the reps. Stock sent to a rep isn't moving to another location the business tracks. It's leaving the business's inventory, which makes it an adjustment, not a transfer. Whatever replaced Stocky needed to let the team select a whole group of pieces, adjust them together with one note about where they were going, and export the result with retail price to document what went out.

“Most of the other recommended apps were either very expensive and provided more functions than we needed. We chose Channel Bay because it most closely aligned with the features we used in Stocky.”

Why They Chose Channel Bay

Channel Bay was the closest match to the features they used in Stocky, without the extras. It also let them move at their own pace:

• It runs alongside Stocky. Channel Bay doesn't take over from Stocky automatically. Both can run in parallel, and purchase orders changed in Stocky still sync to Shopify.
• Their history comes with them. Channel Bay imported their suppliers and past purchase orders from Stocky, and can rebuild which supplier provides each product from that order history.

Where Channel Bay didn't yet work the way they did, the team asked for changes, and Channel Bay made them. The biggest was the rep workflow. On the first call, Channel Bay agreed to build a bulk inventory adjustment with one reason and note for the whole group, and an adjustment report with retail price. Both went live within ten days.

How They Work Now

When stock goes to a rep, the team selects the pieces in the inventory list and adjusts them all at once, with a single note such as the rep's name. That note is saved in each SKU's history, and the team can export the adjustment report, with current retail price, as a record of the stock sent out.

Because many SKUs are long and look alike, the team can add retail price and barcode columns to the inventory list and see each full SKU on hover, so they can check they have the right piece before adjusting it.

They have also started raising and receiving purchase orders in Channel Bay.

The Results

Kate King Jewellery replaced Stocky on its own schedule, running both apps side by side while it moved, with its suppliers and purchase order history brought across. It got a tool sized to how it works, rather than one of the larger, pricier apps it had been pointed to.

Sending stock to a rep is now one bulk adjustment with one note instead of a line-by-line job, and the team can export it with retail price whenever they need a record.

If you're leaving Stocky too, see how Channel Bay replaces Stocky.